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Shearer: WIT could improve 'popsicle index'

Imagine a town called Athens where all children are healthy, safe, engaged and successful, and where we, as a community, are doing whatever it takes to achieve the goal of seeing all children graduating from some form of postsecondary education.

A dream? Perhaps. I’ve just spent a year engaged with a lot of other dreamers working toward just this goal. The partners and supporters of Whatever It Takes believe it’s achievable. The Safety and Juvenile Justice Strategic Action Team of WIT spent many hours focusing on child safety and how we can raise our community’s “popsicle index.”

The popsicle index is the percentage of people in a community who believe a child can leave home, go to the nearest place to buy a popsicle, and return home safely. For most of you reading this, the popsicle index in your childhood neighborhoods was probably pretty high, Today, we don’t feel as secure, even though national statistics show that crime is down all over the nation, including Athens.

The popsicle index doesn’t measure crime. It measures how we feel about our communities; how we invest our time, energy, and resources. Communities where not just parents, but the majority of citizens, are engaged and thoughtful about the well-being of children in general tend to have a higher popsicle index. How we feel about community safety is important. Feelings become reality.

The Safety and Juvenile Justice Strategic Action Team contributed to this comprehensive WIT plan. The solutions proposed are evidence-based, multidisciplinary and child-focused. Some of the solutions are centered on individuals, such as building mindfulness practices into education and community activities, and education aimed at youth to reduce bullying and adolescent dating violence.

Other solutions are more community-centered, such as creating a peer court for nonviolent and first-time offenders to be adjudicated in a way that holds teens accountable while providing a sense of justice that may not be achieved when a disposition is assigned by the judge or probation officer. We also recommended emphasizing restorative justice and expanding a longtime community program called Rites of Passage.

Agency practices were also examined, with an emphasis on early intervention and removing barriers to school attendance. Some of these things are being done already. A collaborative school attendance panel meets regularly — and has for more than 10 years. A truancy accountability court has been in place for three years. But we can do a better job, and through commitment to Whatever It Takes these efforts will expand.

As an aside, it’s important to me that many of the solutions also target behaviors that are shown to be factors in adult domestic violence. Exposure to domestic violence has a profound negative effect on all aspects of childhood, from health to education to interpersonal behaviors, such as bullying and teenage dating violence — not to mention the very real safety risk that violence in the home poses to children.

The majority of children in foster care in this county — about 110 right now — have domestic violence as a factor in their removal. Reducing the negative effects of domestic violence on children helps to reduce the cycle of violence and its incredible cost to our community

The entire WIT team is working to bring imagination to life, to create a new reality from these proposed solutions — to raise our popsicle index, if you will.

Money is not the issue. It’s about how we manage our existing resources and how we view our problems and their solutions that bring about change. Together we are stronger. Collaboration and communication among WIT partners gives us the power to bring clarity to our dreams for a better community. That’s the first step toward turning those dreams into reality. We’re off to a great start.